1. Field of the Disclosed Embodiments
The disclosed embodiments relate to the collection, formatting, dissemination, and display of travel-related information on a low-cost display bank.
2. Introduction
Ready access to information is critical to many aspects of people's lives. The information required often exists in many places, but not always in the places the information would be most useful. As an example, the information about the arrival, departure, delay, or cancellation of various modes of travel (aircraft, train, bus, etc.) exists in various databases and other locations for specific uses, such as displaying flight information to visitors to an airport, but that information is typically confined to the airport premises, or the airport's or airline's web site. There are many other locations and potential consumers of the data, but the cost of distributing the data using conventional technology is too high due to expensive display technology, expensive communication links, etc.
For example, displays showing travel information, such as Flight Information Displays (FIDS), are widely used in society today. The 2 basic types of FIDS displays are 1) multiple display or monitor groups forming banks of displays each showing a static image of a specified number of flight entries, and, 2) single display/monitor installations which scroll through a number of pages/images to accommodate numbers of pages required to ultimately show all flights for a specific facility/configuration.
With respect to the bank of FIDS displays, communications can be cumbersome and problematic if all of the displays are wired and each being fed information from a remote source. Since a remote source (e.g., a remote content data server) must talk to many displays over a network, this large message traffic may result in delays, lost packets, conflicts, and network congestion that may affect other travel services. Furthermore, if a display fails, there is no easy way for the remote device to reconfigure the data to displayed in another manner on the remaining displays.
Another problem or issue inherent in these FIDS systems is that it is somewhat time consuming and difficult to locate the flight of interest by the specific user. In situations where there could be 8 displays each displaying 30 flights sorted in various ways, finding specific flight information is difficult. In situations where there is a single display being used to display as many as 25 pages of flights with as many as 30 flights per page, the delay between pages and the difficulty of locating/identifying a specific flight information may take an extremely long time or be almost impossible altogether.